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The book is excellent for undergraduate teaching, for satisfying general interest, and for academics, students, and the general public to ascertain the essentials of Enlightenment and Romantic thought regarding Europe.

In view of the challenges—many of which are political—that different European countries are currently facing, scholars who work on the eighteenth century have compiled this anthology which includes earlier recognitions of common values and past considerations of questions which often remain pertinent nowadays. During the Enlightenment, many men and women of letters envisaged the continent’s future in particular when stressing their hope that peace could be secured in Europe. The texts gathered here, and signed by major thinkers of the time (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume or Staël for instance), as well as by writers history has forgotten, present the reflections, with a couple of chronological extensions (from Sully to Victor Hugo) of authors from the long eighteenth century—the French Empire and the fall of Napoleon generated numerous upheavals—on Europe, its history, its diversity, but also on what the nations, which, in all their diversity, make up a geographical unit, have in common. They show the historical origins of the project of a European union, the desire to consolidate the continent’s ties to the Maghreb or to Turkey, the importance granted to commerce and the worries engendered by history’s convulsions, but also the hope vested in future generations.

29. Charles de Villers, Constitutions of the Three Free-Hanseatic Towns, Lubeck, Bremen and Hambourg, with a Memorandum on the Rank these Towns should Occupy in Europe’s Commercial OrganisationA Common European Market

30. Stanislas Leszczynski, Conversation Between a European and an Islander from the Kingdom of DumocalaThe Empire of Reason

31. Tomás de Iriarte, Literary FablesThe Circulation of Riches

32. Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, Paris, the Model of Foreign Nations, or French EuropeEuropean Sociability

51. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth CenturyNavigation and Commercial Exchanges

52. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of HumanityEurope and its Long History of Migration

53. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of Emperor Charles VUnion in Diversity

54. Diego de Torres Villarroel, ‘Sonnet’, in The Muse’s DistractionsEurope, A Political Whole

77. Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the ModernsThe Character of Modern Exchanges

78. Pierre-Simon Laplace, An Exposition of the System of the WorldUnity through Measures

79. Victor Hugo, The RhineThe Franco-German Couple as the Pillars of Peace in Europe

Bibliography

Catriona Seth, FBA, is Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls. Her research focuses on French literature of the long eighteenth century, and her books include a biography of Évariste Parny, Évariste Parny (1753-1814). Créole, révolutionnaire, académicien, and La Fabrique de l’intime. Mémoires et journaux de femmes du XVIIIe siècle. She is the editor, in Gallimard’s prestigious Pléiade series, of Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses and, most recently, of works by Germaine de Staël. She was a lecturer at the University of Rouen and a professor at the University of Lorraine. From 2013 to 2014 she was a World Leading Researcher at Queen's University, Belfast.

Rotraud von Kulessa is Chair of French and Italian Literature at the University of Augsburg. She is the author of Démocratisation et diversification - Les littératures d'éducation au siècle des Lumières and Entre la reconnaissance et l’exclusion. La position de l’autrice dans le champ littéraire en France et en Italie à l’Epoque 1900. She has written widely about French, Italian and Spanish literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In 2016/2017 she was Visiting Professor at the University of Lorraine (Nancy) specialising in eighteenth-century French literature and in 2016 she was made an Officer of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

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